Accurate temperature monitoring is necessary to ensure the safety and efficacy of all medications and vaccines. That should be a given in the pharmacy industry. But the truth is, for many pharmacy chains and independents, temperature monitoring is merely guesswork. Too frequently staff responsible for temperature monitoring don’t understand the “why” of recording temperatures.
In our blog post about refrigerator temperature monitoring, we discussed the driving factors behind food waste within the restaurant industry, and we debunked the misconception that restaurants are exposed to liability risk if they donate their leftover food.
If you’re still using a paper temperature log, then there is a very high probability of undiscovered thermal excursions in your fridges and freezers. Accompanying these unseen excursions is a high likelihood of you administering ineffective vaccines and medications.
Food waste is a pressing issue. Americans dispose of 160 billion pounds of food per year. That’s 40% of all food available, or 730 football stadiums full of discarded but safe food that is still edible. Many restaurants contribute to this waste when they dispose of unsold food at the end of the day.
In the first two posts of this series, we discussed the challenges associated with physical buffer vials and SmartSense’s solution - the Virtual Buffer Vial (VBV), a patented modeling approach that simulates actual product temperature and eliminates the need for physical buffers.
With flu season fast-approaching, your pharmacies will be receiving a large influx of vaccines. As they are inherently unstable, flu vaccines require temperature control during storage and transit along the cold chain. Sub-optimal temperatures can result in wasted product, or worse, costly re-vaccination programs.
